November 2014 Blog Posts (9)

1993 would be my final year of collaboration with the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. But what an eventful and fruitful year it would turn out to be!

The 1992 Saint Paul Neighborhood Forum, described in my previous post, whetted the appetite in my community for approaching the city archetypally. So later that year I began exploring opportunities to expand both the audience and the scope of the discussion. I was able to find allies at a local Catholic women's…

Returning from our trip to Mexico, we see that Americans are gawking at – or turning their faces away from – TV images of the protests over the outrageous news from Ferguson. Michael Brown was another (and there have been many since) in a long list of unarmed Black men murdered by the police. Hundreds of grieving families because of our refusal to confront the racist foundations of our society and our continual denial of death.

In early 1992 I had the opportunity to bring the insights I learned from the Dallas Institute into the life of Saint Paul, the city where I was working as a planner. Several images and ideas were inspiring me at that time: the need for cities to advance culture but avoid the traps of imperialistic "civilization," the importance of having places of soul but also a strong civic spirit to bring a broader identify into focus, attentiveness to seven generations back and seven generations…

For the last two weeks my blog has described how my emerging terrapsychological perspective in 1991 was enriched by mentoring from Robert Sardello of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. He provided me with important insights about how cities should be centers of culture, nor civilization, but also how it is necessary for cities to have both strong souls (typically rooted in neighborhoods) and strong spirits (typically centered in downtowns).

Archetypal pattern analysts, depth psychologists, Jungians, Freudians, students of human development and consciousness have a lens through which they try to make sense of the world and our place in it. Humanists, behaviorists, reductionists, all sorts of “ists” postulate, theorize and ponder the human condition as…

One of the many phrases that will stay with me from this week at Women's Future First 2014 Congress is that of Joanna Macy: sustaining the gaze. Even though what we see in the world is frightening and enraging, it is so important we witness (not deny) what mankind has perpetrated upon our planet and to feel, to let…

My post of last week described Robert Sardello's advice to Saint Paul City government leaders in 1991: pursue culture, not civilization. That is, allow cultural creativity to flourish without interference from other spheres of human activity that seek to dominate the cultural realm. In particular, don't regard culture as a means to the end of economic profit. Instead, cherish cultural activity as a pillar of what Lewis Hyde calls the Gift Economy which expects no return on investment, but…

In a letter dated June 12, 1933 C.G. Jung wrote, "You have a mind just as well as any other human being and you can use it if you only know how to apply it. Any of my pupils could give you much insight and understanding that you could treat yourself if you don't succumb to the prejudice that you receive healing through others. In the last resort every individual alone has to win his battle, nobody else can do it for him."

I was intrigued to read Patricia Damery's October 27 blog post describing a recent San Francisco seminar on Jung and Steiner, and their contributions to an evolution of consciousness. Synchronistically, that relates closely to the topic of my blog for today, picking up on my post of last Saturday.

When I met Robert Sardello of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture in 1991, we had both recently become students of Steiner and valued his thought as a complement to that…